Yoga Therapy Course for Parents of Children with Additional Needs

The remaining spaces on our Therapeutic Yoga for Children with Additional Needs – Yoga Teacher Training are now open to parents, SNA’s, caregivers and school teachers.

Run by experienced paediatric occupational therapist Ines Lawlor and yoga therapist, Lisa Wilkinson, you will learn over 30 yoga postures and relaxations and breathing exercises to help children with additional needs. The course will be broken down into sections where specific issues will be outlined with tailored sequences for children with sensory processing difficulties, Dyspraxia, ASD, ADHD, Down Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy.

Taking this course will benefit the child or children you work with in bringing the magic of yoga as a therapy into your lives. In isolation this course is not intended for you to become a yoga therapist (This requires completion of an accredited Yoga for Children Teacher Training Course), but instead it can be used to tailor sequences for children in your care.

Yoga sequence to aid relaxation

Here is a lovely sequence you can use at home for children who have issues with regulating their emotions. This will help them to calm down and relax. What we are looking at here is to use the proprioceptive sense and help calm it using:

• Gravity
• Pressure
• Internal squeezes of their nerve rich organs

And breath!

Try these great techniques to help with the sensory overload that often sends children into a spiral of uncontrollable emotions.

• Start by finding a space with minimal distractions and explain you are going to both take a few minutes to have some yoga fun together.
• Get a simple light object such as a small book.
• Ask the child to lie down on the floor with their legs feet distance apart and place the book on their belly button
• Get the child to place their hands on the book with your hands lightly on top
• The game here is trying to breath so when they inhale the book lifts up and when they exhale the book moves back down
• Encourage them to lift the book slowly and release the book slowly back
• Once they get this say – do you think you can do that with your hands instead of the book?
• If yes, take the book away and leave their hands on their belly with your hands lightly resting on top. If necessary you can use a tiny amount of pressure to emphasise how the belly rises and falls
• Get them to close their eyes and then to feel the breath like a wave in and out of their body.
• As they do this say you are going to give them lovely massages across their body whilst they breath and slide your hands (not losing contact) to their feet. Give them a gentle squeeze across the bones of their feet. Then their heels
• Then their ankles and continue slowly up the body over the major joints finishing at their shoulders.

Ask the children to to kneel and then :

• Twisting from the hips turn their body to look over one shoulder placing one arm behind and one arm in front letting the hips slide to one side.
• Hold this for a few breaths then turn to the opposite side.

Then ask the children to lie on their tummies:

• Bring their hands on top of each other and lay the side of their cheek on their hands.
• Place their big toes together and let the heels flop out
• Encourage them now to take deep belly breaths and feel their belly pushing into the ground as they breath
• Each breath – ask them to imagine they are getting heavier each time they breath out and the contact they are making with the floor is getting stronger and stronger.
• Now ask them (or show them) to bring their hands in front of their shoulders and rest up on with their elbows under their shoulders. This is spinx pose – it has a great proprioceptive feedback for the body as the weight of their upper body and head can release through through their neck and shoulder girdle and down to the spine.
• Turn their cheek the opposite way and get them to belly breath into the floor again and then repeat
• Always finish on the belly breath relaxation pose.

Our next course starts on 15th October 2016. If you would like to enrol on our Therapeutic Yoga for Children with Additional Needs – Yoga Teacher Training please contact Moya on +353 1 677 9859 or email training@the-elbowroom.com